The Warp and Weft of Memory

The Warp and Weft of Memory is a research project by artist Renée Turner. She has been funded by the Mondriaan Fund to work at Castrum Peregrini from September 2016 to September 2018. The work explores the wardrobe of Gisèle d’Ailly van Waterschoot van der Gracht,and the ways in which it reflects her life, work, and histories through textiles and clothing. The aim is to weave connections to the present from a personal perspective. As a whole the project will have different contributions and public manifestations through public lectures, an exhibition and an online narrative combining artefacts, written reflections and images from Gisèle’s own archive of photographs.

Update One Year On: Inside Gisèle’s Closet

Renée Turner

Illustration of Gisèle’s attic apartment closet by Cesare Davolio

Her closet is full. Next to garments on hangers, there are also shelves stacked with various accessories and boxes. Summer shoes, wool hats, leather gloves, woven bags and exotic slippers – each box has its own label penned with a black magic marker. More labels float within the boxes; these are subcategories.

The smell of Gisèle’s closet is a combination of dust, dry rot, perfume and naphthalene. The heating pipes run through the closet, making it unbearably warm and the aromas combined with the heat, become a scent diffuser. I try to smell her, but can’t. We can only smell people we’ve known. Or that’s how we recognize that we smell them. Her scent might still be there, but I never knew Gisèle, and cannot recognize it. To be in someone else’s closet is an odd experience. It is intimate, and sometimes uncomfortably so. These objects were the nearest to her body, and many garments still retain her shape. Clothing animates our bodies, and we in turn animate our clothes. Virginia Woolf writes about this in her novel, To the Lighthouse: “What people had shed and left — a pair of shoes, a shooting cap, some faded skirts and coats in wardrobes — those alone kept the human shape and in the emptiness indicated how once they were filled and animated; how once hands were busy with hooks and buttons; how once the looking-glass had held a face; had held a world hollowed out in which a figure turned…” (1) Working on a project like this, I realize projection is inevitable; the gaps are filled with my own reflection.

Left: Gisèle’s mirror 2017, Right: Gisèle’s mirror date unknown

I have spent the past year photographing the contents of Gisèle’s closet and scanning relevant images from her photographic archive. Some items are of significance, like her dresses designed by Dick Holthaus, a well-known Dutch designer, and others are more banal, like a box of gloves or a drawer of pantyhose. What should be done with those things with little status?

Some of Gisèle’s clothes are not represented in her archive of photographs. For example, there are no images of her in the Holthaus dresses. Maybe she didn’t like the formal occasions during which she wore them. But other clothes are in images, especially those the most closely related to her work. For example her vividly coloured harlequin costume was used as a source for her paintings. She was her own muse.

An image taken from Gisèle’s archive, one of several photographs of her modelling for one of her paintings. Painting: ‘Plumed ladies’ (1964)

Gisèle’s harlequin costume as found in her closet. Made of polyester, the colour remains unfaded.

As the clothes are documented, images are scanned, and eventually uploaded and tagged within the digital archive, I think about what makes an object worthy of remembrance. By what merit is something christened heritage or not? With that judgement, the present casts its dice towards an imagined future, waging a bet on stakes unknown. What constitutes value in the now might not be necessarily significant for the future and vice versa. It is a posture akin to Marshall McLuhan’s adage in The Medium is the Massage: “The past went that-a-way. When faced with a totally new situation, we tend always to attach ourselves to the objects, to the flavour of the most recent past. We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.” In imagining the future and what it will value, we sometimes fall short of the mark. While McLuhan was speaking about technology, his sentiments are equally prescient when thinking about how we stockpile the present for tomorrow’s history.

Credits and Thanks:

The Mondriaan Fund

Castrum Peregrini: Michael Defuster, Frans Damman & Lars Ebert

Kate Pullinger: contributor

Frans-Willem Korsten: contributor

Andre Castro: mediawiki and server space

Ana Isabel Carvalho and Ricardo Lafuente: frontend design

Cristina Cochior: scans, photography and mediawiki

Cesare Davolio: illustrations

Riek Sijbring: advice on textiles and clothing

All images are the sole copyright of the Castrum Peregrini Foundation and were selected and scanned as a part of The Warp and Weft of Memory, a project by artist Renée Turner. The project was made possible through the generous support of the Mondriaan Fund.

In spring 2016 we announced The Warp and Weft of Memory as upcoming research project by Renée Turner as follows:

“Every poet of furniture — even if he be a poet in a garret, and therefore has no furniture — knows that the inner space of an old wardrobe is deep.”

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 1958

The Warp and Weft of Memory is a research project by artist and writer Renée Turner, which will result in an online narrative exploring the contents of Gisèle d’Ailly van Waterschoot van der Gracht’s wardrobe, and the ways in which it reflects her life, work, and larger histories through textiles and clothing.

The project, combining fact and fiction, has been generously supported by the Creative Industries Fund NL, and is a collaboration with Kate Pullinger (award winning author of novels and digital fiction), Andre Castro (with an expertise in wikis, Open Source software and hybrid publishing), Ana Isabel Carvalho and Ricardo Lafuente (a free/libre graphic design duo working under the name Manufactura Independente), and Cesare Davolio (an illustrator working on educational projects and socially oriented campaigns).

At the end of the research period, the online multi-nodal narrative will be launched along with an exhibition and series of related lectures, presentations and discussions.

We, the friends and supporters of Castrum Peregrini, are deeply concerned by the recent arrest of Osman Kavala. Kavala was detained on 18 October Istanbul’s Atatürk Airport upon returning from the southeastern city of Gaziantep. He has been held in detention ever since. No charges have so far been laid against him.

Osman Kavala is not just a friend of Castrum Peregrini but one of Turkey’s most important intellectual and cultural figures. He has played a prominent part both in defending the rights and liberties of all in Turkey, and in bringing together people of different political viewpoints to discuss their differences and to work out a common language of civil debate. Nothing could be more important in Turkey – and in many other countries – today.

Osman Kavala has played an important role not just in encouraging discussion inside Turkey but also in presenting the complexities of Turkey to the outside world. His work has been invaluable in making many people outside the country understand and appreciate Turkey. His work should be celebrated, not condemned.

We call for the immediate release of Osman Kavala. We call also for the release of the many others – academics, journalists and public servants – who have also been arrested and detained in recent months in similar circumstances. We support the work of all those in Turkey striving to create a strong civil society in which political disagreements and disputes can be resolved through public discussion and mutual respect.

De Oude Kerk, Museum van Loon, Castrum Peregrini and De Reinwardt Academie make up the coalition “Transhistoriciteit” supported within the framework of 3Package Deal. It wants to stimulate ‘creative producers’ to develop activities that connect and combine historic periods and cultural contexts.

Smári Róbertsson (Iceland,1992) is an artist based in Amsterdam. In his poetic works he explores site-specific phenomena and basic architectural elements, which are translated through his practice into written pieces, musical compositions and site-specific installations. The focus of his work often lies on the inherit need we feel to autobiographize our life experiences in order to account for our existence and surrounding. Through his works we encounter objects, who’s history not only shaped them, but who owe their autonomy and existence to the incidental processes which happen in the backdrop of our own lives.

Róbertsson holds a BFA from Gerrit Rietveld Academie (2015) and an MA from the Sandberg Institute (2017) in Amsterdam.

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This two-day international conference in Amsterdam about participatory art in education and culture featured keynote presentations of cutting edge initiatives, panel discussions, workshops and open space technology sessions for an active role of all participants sharing their practice and peer-to-peer exchange.

The conference Living as Form followed up on previous conferences Participation on Trial (Amsterdam, October 2014) and European Academy of Participation (Dublin, October 2016). It concluded the 2nd year of the EU project European Academy of Participation,

Living as Form brought together international and national initiatives to foster synergies: How is internationalisation of education taking shape? What good practice can we share of border crossing artistic and community work? How to match the international and the local in cultural programmes?

Living as Form discussed the relations of the cultural and social field and education and the possibilities of a formalised educational offer for artists that involves all these areas.

Who participated?

Artists, curators, producers, community and institutional leaders, teachers, researchers and critics, from the Netherlands and around the world.

Why?

Nato Thompson, from whom we borrow the title of this conference, asks whether it is time at the beginning of the 21st century to return Duchamp’s urinal from the museum to the real world. But the question arises whether it would be accepted by the ‘real world’ today, where one is suspicious towards arts and the artists in their elite bubble. Art keeps engaging with life, trying to find new forms of expression and impact. What is the artistic form of live today, or should we rather talk about art as resistance? And how does education prepare the artists of the future for their role in these new realities?

The conference Living As Form critically discussed the embeddedness of participatory practice in an international framework that has rapidly changed in the last two years. Before that, participatory art has largely been perceived through the historical lens of what happened since the fall of the Berlin wall. The ‘end of history’-feeling has led to the long prevailing paradigm of neoliberalism, our current political order of free trade and open markets. In this paradigm, the private sector takes the lead and the role of the public and that of the state supporting the public is pushed to the background. Simultaneously, alongside the positive effects of participation in and through art and culture, the term participation has been appropriated by the neoliberal policies to stress the fact that individuals need to take their own responsibility versus a withdrawing welfare state. Political support focussed on the economy and the financial market, not the citizen. In turn, and quite ironically, citizens and artists were expected to compensate for austerity politics, being manoeuvred into roles that would ‘art wash’ a misery that should have actually been solved by other professionals: care takers, city planners, social workers etc..

Meanwhile, the world has changed. One could believe that in countries like the USA, Britain, Poland, the Netherlands and Hungary, the revolutionary potential of people and their representatives, long considered to be the domain of the left, is now with populist and nationalist movements that battle principles of enlightenment such as human rights, equality and solidarity. In the fake and factless news their representatives produce, expertise, high end culture and, consequently, artists are framed as the enemies of the ‘people’. Nevertheless, the basic question stays the same: how can artists engage with communities in a mutual beneficial way, towards progress and more culturally and economically inclusive societies?

In the period October 2015 – February 2016 all partners of the EAP project have collaboratively developed a Tuning Document Participatory Art Practice_Creative Producerand the respective graduate profile of a Creative Producer. The document is intended as a reference document that reflects the diversity of the field in Europe and at the same time serves as a benchmark for curriculum builders, teachers, employers and all those academics and practitioners that want to enhance educational and practical development. It set out to establish a MA level standard and contribute to enhancing pedagogy in this field of practice. It is published at www.academyofparticipation.org.

The documents competences inform an intensive Higher Education Course Module that EAP has piloted in London in July 2017 with 30 international students (art graduates and mid-career artists) and 12 international teachers.

The conference was embedded in the projects activities and discussions so far, and invited the Dutch and the international field to contribute with expertise and experiences and use the event as a networking and sharing possibility.

Organised by

In collaboration with Goethe Institut Lyon and Amsterdam, Tandem for Culture, Community Participation (European Cultural Foundation/MitOst), and representatives of the Willem De Kooning Academy Rotterdam, DAS Art Amsterdam, University of Utrecht and University of the Arts Utrecht.

The conference was financially supported by Fonds Voor Cultuurparticipatie, The Erasmus+ programme of the European Commission and the Goethe Institute Netherlands.

Castrum Peregrini Foundation is an independent cultural centre in an Amsterdam canal house. It emerged out of a community that survived there in hiding during World War II. It wants to be a place where individuals come together to make a positive contribution to an inclusive society. Participation in art and culture is a prime instrument towards this goal.

Radical openness towards the past

The complex history of Castrum Peregrini has been subject to research of historians, literature scholars, sociologists and artists. Despite the many and good studies that exist there is a growing demand for research into areas such as resistance, subversive strategies, the relation of arts, crafts and community as well as ideology and politics of the apolitical e.a.

It is equally and especially important to shed light on power relations, sexual dependencies and group dynamics as well as on issues of gender, race and class.

We want to encourage all independend research related to the many histories of Castrum Peregrini. The archives that are accessible in our premises are open for all serious researchers.

In the light of the recent interest in possible sexual abuse in the circles around Wolfgang Frommel we support all efforts to shed light on this troubled past.

Proposals of research projects will be put forward to our research council chaired by Prof. Rosemarie Buikema (University of Utrecht). The council will appraise applications and support researchers. Later in 2017 the council will also publish their own research agenda.

Applications for use of our archives can be put forward to mail@castrumperegrini.nl

We have realised the first round of our think tank, the Castrum Peregrinin Dialogue, with the generous support of the Pauwhoff Fund and in close partnership with the European Cultural Foundation and the Dialogue Advisory Group. The latter – an internationally acclaimed group of peace mediators- holds office here in our premises.

The ECF is a kindred organisation that is close to our heart in many respects. With our own history as a hiding place in which art, culture and friendship helpt young people to survive in this house we embrace ECFs mission to strive for an open, democratic and inclusive Europe within which culture is a valued and key contributor.

Together Castrum Peregrini and the ECF share the desire to develop viable concepts of living together in diversity.

In our recent publication The House of Gisèle we have published Kenan Maliks wonderful article Living in Diversity, a lecture that he delivered when we launched the house of Gisèle and Job Cohen unveiled a plaque at our building in May 2016. We took Kenans tekst as a motivation, a framing paper so to speak to bring together a divers group of thinkers from all walks of life and various disciplines to meet three times in one year for 2,5 days and analyse in a conversation, the root causes of fragmentation in Europe and the world today and what we need to take into account when thinking about how living in diversity can work. We tried to balance participation of man and woman, younger and older generation, white and non-white, various religious backgrounds. Also we made sure that we create a protected environment, apply Chatham House Rules for instance, so that everyone feels safe and can speak up, be vulnerable and engage in a dialogue that is based on learning from one another in the first place. Our experience is that our heritage – like the studio of Gisèle – offers a frame, physically and spiritually, which makes those conversations more easy, respectful and intense.

Also we engaged two experienced moderators, Avrum Burg, members of our board of recommendation, author and former speaker of the Knesset as well as Ram Manikkalingam, director of the Dialogue Advisory Group, seconded by Fleur Ravensbergen.

We work to a set agenda, everybody of the 20 participants around the table gives a short input to a certain session, like social justice, and then we speak for 1,5 hours, before we go to the next session. All is reported and after three meetings we bundle it to share it with opinnleaders, programme makers, activists etc. For this first round of meetings 2016/17 we strive to publish outcomes by December 2017.

2017 artists in the residence at Castrum Peregrini supported by the Mondriaan Fund

March & April 2017: Pieter Paul Pothoven

The work of Pieter Paul Pothoven (1981, NL) comprises sculpture, installation, and includes different forms of writing as well. In his projects, he searches for alternative ways of engaging with the past through study of historical sites, artifacts and resources, in ord

er to mediate new relationships with history often based on their potential use-value in the present. During a 2-month residency at Castrum Peregrini, he will continue to study socialist resistance before, during and after the Second World War in Amsterdam. Central to his project is a comparative study of three groups that organized their actions in radically different times but share similar motives.

Pieter Paul Pothoven received his BFA at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam (NL) and his MFA at Parsons The New School of Design, New York. He was a resident at Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown (US), Van Eyck Academie, Maastricht (NL) and Instituto Sacatar, Salvador (BR). His work has been shown in various solo and group exhibitions. Recent exhibitions include: ‘You talkin’ to me?’, Barbara Seiler, Zürich (CH); ‘Sunsets never looked as stunning as through the haze of factory sooth’, Van Eyck Acadamie, Maastricht (NL); ‘Territorial Drift’, Garage, Rotterdam (NL); ‘Listen to the Stones, think like a mountain’, Tatjana Pieters, Ghent (BE); ‘Lapis Lazuli from Serr-i-Sang’, PuntWG, Amsterdam (NL); ‘11:59, on a date of no particular significance’, Hudson D. Walker gallery, Provincetown (US); ‘The intelligence of Things’, The Kitchen, New York (US). He initiated and co-curated ‘Weight of Colour’, a symposium about the materiality of color, Amsterdam (NL) and the group exhibition ‘I scarcely have the right to use this ghostly verb’, New York, (US). His texts have been published in amongst others: Anamesa Journal, Simulacrum, Volume, De Gids and Beyroutes, an Alternative Guide to Beirut. Currently he lives and works in Amsterdam. pieterpaulpothoven.com

October & November 2017: Aimée Zito Lema

Rond de Jambe, video still, 2015

Expanding an insignificant event, isolating a sudden movement, choosing an affective gesture and zeroing in on it until we lose ourselves in the sounds it emits, the grain of the photo or the word that names it, furnishes us with a chance to reinterpret the events as they are presented to us, and of understanding history from new perspectives.

Aimée Zito Lema grounds her practice in this premise. Based on a process of selection and appropriation, Zito Lema zooms in on the detail of gestures, often by using archive images taken of working class demonstrations or counter-cultural movements. This motif, once enlarged almost to the point of abstraction, brings to mind the mechanism that enables cooperation and development within a community, or a movement, or an affective structure than bonds a group or a family. It is revealed to us in her work, just as a tiny detail can give rise to a community spirit and all that this brings with it. Her artistic practice structures the narrative around the process, triggering a dynamic that, taken together, lends meaning to the work. The idea leads to an expression, act or performance. This work in turn gives rise to the object that, inasmuch as a metaphor, returns us to the expression from which it came, only to be recycled and give birth to new possibilities.*

For her residency at Castrum Peregrini Zito Lema will focus on the role of friendship within adverse social-political circumstances. She will research different notions of friendship in political contexts, taking as starting point the history of the house of Gisele van Waterschoot. Looking at past and present, searching for traces of these notions of friendship, understood as solidarity and support structure.

Portrait Aimée: Photo by Hugo Tillman

Visual artist Aimée Zito Lema (born in Amsterdam, 1982, grew up in Buenos Aires) studied at the University of the Arts, Buenos Aires, the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam, and followed the Master Artistic Research program of the Royal Academy in The Hague (2009 – 2011). She was artist-in-resident at the Rijksakademie (2015-2016). Her recent exhibitions include: The 11th Gwangju Biennale; The Dorothea von Stetten Award, Kunstmuseum Bonn; Hors Pistes: L’art de la Revolte, Centre Pompidou Paris (all in 2016); the long-term project Body at Work at Casco, Utrecht (2013 – 2014); and the residency ‘Het Vijfde Seizoen’, Den Dolder, (2011).

De Oude Kerk, Museum van Loon, Castrum Peregrini and De Reinwardt Academie make up the new coalition “Transhistoriciteit” supported within the framework of 3Package Deal. It wants to stimulate ‘creative producers’ to develop activities that connect and combine historic periods and cultural contexts.

The coalition partners have selected Tel Aviv based artist Ronit Porat to live and work in Amsterdam for a year as of September 2016. Her studio will be based, in turn, at the host institutions.

Artist Ronit Porat writes about her art, “My engagement with times and places is not an external one, but applies a subjective circular motion that begins with the personal, shifts to the collective, and then returns to the self.” So then, according to Porat – who holds a MFA from the esteemed Chelsea College of Art and Design and who has exhibited her art in dozens of shows from Paris to Warsaw to Jerusalem to Albania and beyond – time and history are transcendent and the mistakes and victories of our histories reside with us now and here.

Her art clearly explores these concepts of subjectivity and transcendence and connectedness, and her primary tools are juxtaposition, overlay, and mixed media. Using these tools among many, she shows us that time and history are not just one thing, but they are cobbled together to forge a collective memory that colors the way we see the world: on top of an image of an unidentified boy, she scribbles a Hitler mustache; she juxtaposes a nose-diving war plane with a nose-diving woman dressed in a short white garment; she tears in half a self portrait of Marianne Breslauer; in several images of unusual bodies, she convolutes anatomy and physiology to craft images that are at once familiar and alien. And the wondrous, whimsical, challenge of her work is tempered with a muted grayscale color scheme that unites each of her pieces as sentences in one large conversation about what it is to be alive.

One inspiration for Porat’s work is the Kibbutz in which she grew up, a “unique place which derives it identity from its history and the story behind its settlement.” Through her upbringing there, Ronit Porat began to understand how important it was to analyze histories holistically, incorporating objects and artifacts that come from various periods and cultural contexts. One can clearly see this in her work, which is radically inclusive and pleasantly jarring because of its unexpected pairings of disparate images and texts. Regarding her reasons for mixing so many images, Porat says that “everything can be included in order to create new narratives from the images that resonate with memory, pain and belonging.” And indeed, viewers are sure to experience visceral emotions when enjoying the Israeli artist’s work; it is easy to feel as though we too are included in her art, that she is telling our personal histories.

Ronit Porat’s art has resonated with audiences all over the world, and she has received coveted awards from organizations such as America-Israel Cultural Foundation, the Arab Jewish seminar on Creative Environment, the Ministry of Culture and Sport, and the Hadassah College of Technology. She was also named Musrara, Jerusalem’s Artist for Social Change in 2009.

European Academy of Participation

Creative producers and the communities of tomorrow
A Strategic Partnership supported by the ERASMUS+ programme of the European Commission. September 2015 – August 2018

The European Academy of Participation (EAP) brings together 10 partners from all over Europe, including higher education institutions and arts and culture organisations. The project aims to make a contribution to a more inclusive Europe, in which people live together in mutual respect of their differences. The EAP partners consider participatory practice in art and culture as a central tool to involve communities in a positive process of constructing a shared cultural space.

Participation is hot!
A key priority for funders, fostering social cohesion and exposing ethical questions around responsibility and authorship, participatory practice can provide compelling means to communicate through art and culture. It also embraces the dissolving of boundaries between academic and artistic disciplines and those between the policymaker, the artist, the curator and the audience. This increasing flexibility brings about a new practice profile: the creative producer.

EAP wants to develop:
* A shared understanding of a graduate profile for practitioners working in participatory settings, based on the dialogue between higher education, lifelong learning and the creative field.
* A benchmark document that adopts the Tuning Educational Structures in Europe methodology that will be validated and published for the use of educators and practitioners.
This includes a qualifications framework and acknowledges the already existing variety of participatory approaches in the humanities and the arts.
* An intensive 2 month, low-residency module/unit jointly offered by universities and cultural organisations. This post graduate lifelong learning education module/unit targets postgraduate students – from the arts, humanities and social sciences – as well as practitioners including artists, trainers, teachers, curators and others from third sector cultural organizations.
The ambition of EAP is to tap into the existing potential of higher education and the unique and hard won endeavours of creative projects and organizations scattered across Europe that are engaging the public as active agents in their work. Through interaction both sectors impact on the diversifying societies of Europe, valuing participatory practice in the arts.

Nov 2013- Nov 2015

Een samwenwerking tussen

Amie Dicke: “When I first saw the scribble saying ’DO NOT TOUCH~ I am sorting important souvnirs’ on top of an untouched pile of papers, this message perfectly described my own observations at Castrum Peregrini. The note was one of the many small personal reminders from the studio of artist Gisèle (1912-2013), which she wrote down to organize her daily life in the house she eventually lived in for seventy years. I found more important souvenirs, not only on top of or under her piles, but in the margins of her (hand)writings and on the back of old photos and other images and objects. Even in the unwritten or not used paper, I found a story of the unmade.

The more I visit the house the more I see it extending beyond its own walls. I see patterns and relations. I wonder where the images, the pictures I took, actually have their origin. To what extend do the house and the ‘important souvnirs’ affect my perception? Please follow my ongoing exploration at: http://important-souvnirs.com/.

Een samwenwerking

en Castrum Peregrini.

Nov 2013- Nov 2014.

Amie Dicke:

When I first saw the scribble saying ’DO NOT TOUCH~ I am sorting important souvnirs’ on top of an untouched pile of papers, this message perfectly described my own observations at Castrum Peregrini. The note was one of the many small personal reminders from the studio of artist Gisèle (1912-2013), which she wrote down to organize her daily life in the house she eventually lived in for seventy years.

I found more important souvenirs, not only on top of or under her piles, but in the margins of her (hand)writings and on the back of old photos and other images and objects. Even in the unwritten or not used paper, I found a story of the unmade.

The more I visit the house the more I see it extending beyond its own walls. I see patterns and relations. I wonder where the images, the pictures I took, actually have their origin. To what extend do the house and the ‘important souvnirs’ affect my perception? Please follow my ongoing exploration at:

Silent Heroes

The Learning Partnerships looks back on an exciting and rich first half of the project.

The project has made a vibrant start during its first partners meeting in Amsterdam during which the partners have agreed on a structure, method, division of tasks and timeline to approach the project objectives to

be a platform for exchange on the subject of hiding in museum-, memory- and learning environment

find and map stories of hiding and build a website that makes them accessible for a broader public.

give the visitor/learner an active role in finding stories of hiding, making use of online tools and the possibilities of smart-phone recordings

Dates for the immediate next meetings have been agreed as well as the order of meetings. Most meetings will be realized in the second half of the project due to the local agendas that made it more useful for the project to tap into activities of the partners that provide the project with promising synergies.

Amsterdam, 8-10 December 2013, realized

Hohenems, 15-17 June 2014, realized

Berlin, 20-23 September 2014, confirmed

Warsaw, February 2016, to be decided

Hungary, April 2016, to be decided

Amsterdam, June 2016, to be decided

To achieve the projects aims the partners have agreed

– that each partner will be hosting a meeting presents their local museum/educational works concerning silent heroes, and the gaps that they have identified in their context. Both the realized projects/permanent offers as well as the discussion around the development of the respective organization will be addressed with a discussion and written feedback of all partners. To this end a questionnaire has been designed, that will be used by all staff and learners at all meetings. The questionnaires will be collected by the co-ordinator and the outcomes will be made available on the website; the partners strive for comparability in order to draw conclusions for all partners to inform their organizational development plans.

– to build, design, develop and maintain a project website that features their local online resources already available, the partners case studies with the respective peer feedback gathered from the staff and learners and the findings and personal narratives connected with the local reality of the partners and their audience working with silent heroes. This may also require to assign a researcher with analyzing and drawing conclusions from the comparative overview in conjunction with the steering group member’s, which are the representatives of the partner organizations.

The consortium has realized that the material gathered and the research questions (questionnaire) applied are so exciting in terms of outcomes that already after the first two meetings it has become clear that partners want to sustain the outcomes, that especially the website will be developed with a longer term perspective and that it will be extended by other European countries that had a history of hiding during the 2nd world war.

The time planning foresees to have a first draft of the website presented during the next partners meeting in Berlin in September. During the meeting in Warsaw the content to date should be up and online.

In terms of content we have looked at stories of hiding in Amsterdam and those of the silent heroes that helped Jews cross the Austrian/German-Swiss boarder in Hohenems. Examples reach from museum exhibitions (Anne Frank House) to the role of contemporary art in dealing with the past (Castrum Peregrini), the medium of film (Akte Grüninger) and walking tours (Hohenems). In the second part we look ahead to see how Berlin addressed the silent heroes from the German perspective, to Warsaw how a newly established Museum deals with the diversity of viewpoints (with a special focus on the righteous among the nations) and to Hungary with respect to civil society initiatives and walking tours as educational means. Finally in Amsterdam, the Jewish History Museum will conclude the partner meetings with scrutinizing their new initiative ‘Jewish quarter/holocaust memorial’.

All partners are highly motivated and the consortium looks forward to a dynamic and fruitful further learning experience.

Questions for structuring each meeting, for looking at case studies and also for peer coaching feedback on cases presented and discussed:

1) How are the roles of historic persons in the respective memory setting represented:

hiders

helpers
i. passive/silent
ii. active/heroic

2) How are historic sources being used?

3) How is the materiality of the place/space preserved?

Conserved

Reconstructed

Deconstructed

4) Is there a link with the current issues of societies?

Are moral and ethical questions addressed?

Are political questions raised?

Is there space for a philosophical/artistic take on the past?

5) Is the question of identity and image building addressed, especially how the image building has changed in the historic perception of the last 7 decades?

What is the distinct presentation approach, what is the (possibly unique) museological vision/concept and what part does (adult)education play in it?

Summary

This project brings together organisations in the field of holocaust memory and adult learning about the second world war. They share an interest in the history of hiding and the role of oral history for a learning environment that fosters active participation of learners in Museum settings. The project wants to

– be a platform for exchange on the subject of hiding in museum-, memory- and learning environments.

– find and map stories of hiding and build a website that makes them accessible for a broader public.

– give the visitor/learner an active role in finding stories of hiding, making use of online tools and the possibilities of smart-phone recordings.

The last generation of survivors will be in the focus of the activities and also the second generation of family and friends of survivors will be interviewed. The stories will be collected in an online database that can be used by all partners involved and by the wider sector of adult education that addresses the historic role of shelter. This project wants to develop an overarching web portal for the partners websites displaying Hiding places and their stories.

The physical places like the Anne Frank House, Castrum Peregrini and those collected e.g. by the Gedenkstätte Stille Helden in Berlin, will be visited and scrutinized with respect to their methodology of preservation, access for the broader public and educational material and activities.

External funding will ensure broad visibility of the website in all partner countries involved. A sustainability plan must ensure that after the learning partnership ends, the website will be further maintained and that it will be extended by other European countries that had a history of hiding during the 2nd world war.